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"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."
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Exlpore more Experience quotes
"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."
"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
"Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation."
"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."
"Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience."
"We just had a near-life experience!"
"Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure."
"It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests."
"I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."
"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."
"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."
"I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
"The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic-a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall."
"Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have their help, didn't as far as could be discovered, read, either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes."
"The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear."
"The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people, it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."
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